Who else who may least suspect that a college education is more than the price you have to pay to get a degree, which is not just something you have to adapt to the professional, economic and social reality of the moment, that the teaching and university learning can not be reduced to a question of competence, or to be developed only at the expense of educational innovation or the motivation of students. Who else who can least foresee that something did not work as it should when the reality is that every year a number of students, whether the degree it has not lived college but has gone through it, and that has tour as if an obstacle is involved.
This is the concern that has led me to the realization of this dissertation and, thanks to the invaluable help and guidance from my supervisor, we considered many places to stop. The first is the history of the university. We believe that the tradition of the university is essential to recognize and evaluate what we want to keep it because it is worth protecting and safekeeping. This is not to defend a static and hegemonic conception of the tradition of the university but to incorporate the discussion of the problems that contemporary university has earrings, to explain more fully how these problems arose and why they have not been resolved until now. In short, we believe the tradition of the university helps us find lights to the shadows today, inviting us a renewed debate, it can always find something new because I never finished saying what it has to say. The second has been the philosophy of higher education, at least, the major and most renowned.
Both the university history and philosophy of higher education bring out an essential aspect that has become the hub of this work and that is the core of our self-interest. A college education is, above all and foremost, the moral education of the person, of someone who is called to be improved and to be an agent of social change.
It is for this reason that we have seen fit to approach the communitarian critique of liberalism and realize it in the university context. On the one hand, this criticism is, in our view, the best counteracts the current climate, with predominance of liberalism, which governs the present university education and, on the other hand, is offered guidelines to explain the college education more in line with the mission and history of the university. This is not a criticism that goes against all liberal principles; many of them applied to education, have been very successful, but it puts into question the role that has been given to the moral autonomy of the individual, in our case, the teacher and especially the student. We make a proposal that allows us to combine essential features of the university spirit to those who do not want to give, namely consistency with tradition and moral education of the person.